


I Will Build Their Protection With Bloody Hands

by ThisDominionIsMine



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Cohabitation, Cooking, Fluff, Multi, life plans, sleeping habits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 13:16:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/639281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisDominionIsMine/pseuds/ThisDominionIsMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Technically, it's Allison's apartment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Will Build Their Protection With Bloody Hands

Technically, it’s Allison’s apartment. She picks it out the summer before junior year, and it is roughly five seconds afterwards that Scott and Isaac’s on-campus housing contracts get tossed in the trash. They take one afternoon in mid-August to move in, collecting the wayward scraps of three lives to pack them into six-hundred square feet.

It’s a nice little place on the fifth floor of the building, comes with a washer and dryer and a square yard or two of balcony outside the bedroom. The bathroom has an actual tub, the closet isn’t infested with anything, and the only problem with the kitchen is that somebody has to be sitting on the counter if all three of them want to be in there at once.

That’s not an issue, generally. Allison can’t cook beyond following instructions on a box. Isaac isn’t a whole hell of a lot better; he makes a pretty good spaghetti carbonara, but that’s it for him and creative cooking. Scott, on the other hand, when left to his own devices, tends to produce things – they don’t even deserve to be called _dishes_ – that only a teenage boy would eat. After the third bout of arguing about whether KFC-chicken-plus-lettuce could _ever_ qualify as chicken salad, he is banned from showcasing his culinary skills unless he is explicitly making “normal food”. While the definition of “normal food” is very much up for debate (Scott’s argument being, of course, “ _Stiles_ will eat it”) the ban is still quite successful, because college students (and werewolves) might not be picky, but there are _some_ standards.

They still eat like shit. There’s age-old staple of Ramen, supplemented by Allison’s pancakes (chocolate chip for Scott, blueberry for her and Isaac), Isaac’s carbonara, potato chips, curly fries, anything they can scavenge from Stiles, and, of course, whatever they can pilfer from restaurants dumb enough to have buffets and all-you-can-eats in a college town. Really, what do they expect? It’s not like their customers are worried about cholesterol.

When Allison adds their names to the lease – their two very-obviously-male names to fit into this one-bedroom apartment – she gets a long, studious look before the woman shuffles the papers away. That’s just something she’s had to get used to.

She handles it better than Isaac, who, some days, seems half-convinced that they don’t want him there at all. Of course, when people assume, they often go the other way: three friends living together, going out together, saving money in this desolate economy; maybe two of them will get married, maybe they’ll all go find other people – who knows? So that’s not such an issue.

And Isaac’s good days outnumber his bad ones; they have for a while. He still doesn’t like to talk extensively about himself, still gets tense and careful around the full moons, still has a distinct distrust of male authority figures, but he smiles more now. Laughs without mockery. Sometimes still touches them like he doesn’t think he has the right to, but they’re working on that.

They go running – Allison and Isaac – on a fairly regular basis, late in the evening after classes, or early in the morning. Sometimes Scott comes along, but he prefers to do his running wolfed out or on a lacrosse field. He’s happier to harass Stiles for the answers to his homework or Derek for tidbits of werewolf lore – though not both at the same time, because after a certain point they’ll start cuddling and stop listening. That’s when Scott goes to make hot chocolate – and also the most disgusting thing he can craft and eat in the time he’s left unsupervised – to have waiting for when Allison and Isaac pile back in through the door, flushed from their run and the Northern California cold of autumn and winter and spring.

The bed is a king, but even that feels narrow when two of the three occupants are long-limbed college boys. Scott tends to cling in his sleep, plastering himself over one or both of them: an arm here, a leg there, a warm grip on Isaac’s waist and a foot hooked around Allison’s knee. By comparison, Isaac will hunch in on himself if they let him, arms tucked in against his chest like he’s trying to take up as little space as possible.

The operative phrase in that sentence was ‘if they let him’. They rarely do. Allison likes to be held while she sleeps – a break from always going forward, protecting, being in charge during daylight hours – and Isaac’s a sure bet for that, especially if Scott’s gone for the weekend to visit his mother and it’s just the two of them, because then the bed feels very, very large without him. And Isaac is very, very warm.

When Allison goes home, the boys’ dynamic slides to the right. There is a lot less verbal communication, a lot more touching; Scott isn’t good with words, and Isaac doesn’t trust them, so they have their deep conversations slumped together on the couch, watching TV, with Scott’s arm thrown over Isaac’s shoulders and their bodies pressed together from ankle to cheek, where they can read the way the other tenses and know when to stop pushing. Or they happen in bed at night, when they’re all bound up in one another in such a way as to be indistinguishable – two heads, two hearts, one skin.

Isaac doesn’t have anyone to go home to. Somewhere around spring break of junior year, he stops calling Beacon Hills “home,” period. “Home” becomes their apartment, with Stiles and Derek two floors down and Boyd and Erica across the building and the raucous Italian couple in the unit above. And it’s maybe a bit strange to call a college apartment home – an apartment that they will certainly move out of once they’ve graduated, if not sooner – but the closest thing he has to a family is all here, so it makes sense, too.

College is a finite bubble of semi-adulthood that has the real world forever clawing at the edges, and as their time runs down, they start hanging onto each other tighter. Stiles has an internship lined up in New York, and Derek’s going with him to maybe piece back together a few fragments of the life he lived with Laura. Lydia’s already at MIT – she’s going straight into Harvard’s grad school. Boyd and Erica will do… well, they’ll do whatever it damn well pleases them to do.

As far as their trio is concerned, Scott is shopping for veterinary schools while Allison has set her sights on the University of Washington’s law program. There’s no question of one splintering off – not yet. Not ever. Isaac tells them, one dull and dreary morning, that he’ll follow them anywhere; he hasn’t got a goddamn clue what he’s going to do with his life.

“Child therapist,” Scott suggests, and Isaac snorts.

“I can’t deal with kids.”

Allison shrugs. “Social worker, then. Battered women’s shelter worker. Wolf rescuer. Animal shelter clerk. Cowboy. Astronaut. We’ll find something for you.” She pulls her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around them, leans against his side. “We’re not gonna let you fall.”

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted on tumblr at thewinstonisin.


End file.
